Chapter III: Part 3

The door was wide open. It is a question with my mind if the room ever knew a door. Be this as it may, there sat, with her chair close drawn to her desk, a frail, delicate-looking woman. The ordinary eye might see nothing in a face that was winsome, if not handsome; yet, let the dainty mouth curve in speech, and at once a subtle attraction, lit up by lustrous eyes, permeated the face. One characteristic that made itself felt, in the most sparse conversation with this woman, was her humility, a rare virtue among American literary women. I have known not a few among that irritable class who, no sooner had they sipped the most meagre draught of fame, than they became intoxicated with their own importance, and for the balance of life wooed that meretricious goddess, Notoriety. In fiery prose and tuneful song they told of the dire misfortunes that had been heaped upon their sex by that obstinate vulgar biped, man. Their literature—for that is the name given to the crudest offspring of the press in these days—is noisy, and, says a witty writer, a noisy author is as bad as a barrel organ,—a quiet one is as refreshing as a long pause in a foolish sermon. Clergymen, who have listened to a brother divine on grace, will be the first to see the point. Our authoress—(a female filled with the vanity that troubled Solomon says I should write female author)—is a quiet and unobtrusive writer. Of the tricks that catch and the ways that are crooked in literature, she knows nothing, and what is better, no amount of tawdry fame could induce her to swerve a jot from the hard stony road that leads to enduring success, the only goal worth striving for in the domain of letters. I am well aware that in the popular list of women-writers mouthed by the growing herd of flippant readers that have no other use for a book than as a time-killer,—a herd to whom ideas are as unpalatable as disestablishment to an English parson—you will fail to find the name of Katherine Conway. The reason is simple. She has no fads to air in ungrammatical English, no fallacies to adduce in halting metre. It was a Boston critic who echoed the dictum of the French critic—that grammar has no place in the world of letters. Only have ideas, that is, write meaningless platitudes, grandiose nothings, something that neither man, the angels above nor the demons down under the sea, may decipher, and this illusive verbiage will make you famous. A school of critics will herald your work with such adjectives as “noble, lofty, absorbing, soul-inspiring;” nay, more, a pious missionary friend may be found to to translate the verbiage into Syriac, as a present for converts. Borne on the tide of such criticism, not a few women writers have mistaken the plaudits of notoriety, that passing show, for fame. It was a saying of De Musset’s that fame was a tardy plant, a lover of the soil. Be this as it may, it is safe to assert that its coming is not proclaimed by far-fetched similes, frantic metaphors, sensuous images, ranting style, ignorance of metre, want of grammar; the dishes are not of the voluptuous, morbid or the monstrous kind. Its thirst is not slaked at sewers of dulness spiced with immorality. These symptoms savor of one disease known to all pathologists as notoriety. In an age of this dreaded disease it is surely refreshing to meet with works that breathe gentleness and repose,—a beautiful trust in religion, and a warm, natural heart for humanity. These traits will the reader find in abundance in the pages of Katherine Conway. “What kills a poet,” says Aldrich, “is self-conceit.” Of all the forms self-conceit may assume none is more foolish or detrimental, especially to a woman-poet, than the pluming of oneself as the harbinger of some renovating gospel, some panacea for human infirmities. What is the burden of your message? says the critic to the young poet. Straightway the poet evolves a message, and as messages of this kind ought to be mysterious, the poet wraps them in a jargon as unintelligible as Garner’s monkey dialect. Thus in America has risen a school of woman poetry, deluded by false criticism, calling itself a message to humanity, dubbed rightly the school of passion, and one might add, of pain. This school may ask, “Am I to be debarred from treating of the passions on the score of sex.” By no means; the passions are legitimate subjects. Love, one of them, is your most attractive theme, but as Lilly has it, love is not to you what it is to the physiologist, a mere animal impulse which man has in common with moths and molluscs. Your task is to extract from human life, even in its commonest aspects, its most vulgar realities, what it contains of secret beauty; to lift it the level of art, not to degrade art to its level. Few American writers more fully realized these great artistic truths than the master under whose fatherly tuition Miss Conway had long been placed. Boyle O’Reilly was a Grecian in his love for nature. As such it was his aim to seek the beautiful in its commonest aspects, its most vulgar realities. No amount of claptrap or fine writing could make him mistake a daub for a Turner. In the bottom of his soul he detested the little bardlings who had passed nature by, without knowing her, who wove into the warp and woof of their dulness the putridity of Zola and morbidity of Marie Bashkirtseff. Under such a guide, the poetic ideal set before Miss Conway has been of the highest, and the highest is only worth working for. This ideal must be held unswervingly, even if one sees that books that are originally vicious are “placarded in the booksellers’ windows; sold on the street corners; hawked through the railroad trains; yea, given away, with packages of tea or toilet soap, in place of the chromo, mercifully put on the superannuated list.” These books are but foam upon the current of time, flecking its surface for a moment, and passing away into oblivion, while what Miss Conway happily calls the literature of moral loveliness, or what might as aptly be called the literature of all time, remains our contribution to posterity. Its foundations, to follow the thought of Azarias, are deeply laid in human nature, and its structure withstands the storms of adversity and the eddies of events. For such a literature O’Reilly made a life struggle; his pupil has closely followed his footsteps in the charming, simple, melodious volume that lies before me, “A Dream of Lilies.” Rarely has a Catholic book had a more artistic setting, and one might add, rarely has a volume of Catholic verse deserved it more. Here the poetess touches her highest point, and proves that years of silence have been years of study and conscientious workmanship. In her poem “Success” may be found the key to this volume;

“Ah! know what true success is; young hearts dream,
Dream nobly and plan loftily, nor deem
That length of years is length of living. See
A whole life’s labor in an hour is done;
Not by world-tests the heavenly crown is won,
To God the man is what he means to be.”

“Dream nobly and plan loftily” has been the guiding spirit of this volume. It is a book of religious verse in the true sense, not in the general acceptance of modern religious verse, which is generally dull twaddle, egotism, mawkishness, blind gropings and haunting fears. The gentle spirit of Christ breathes through it, making an atmosphere of peace and repose. There is no bigotry to jar, no narrowness to chafe us, but the broad upland of Christian charity and truth. Nor has our author forgotten that even truth if cast in awkward mould may be passed over. To her poems she has given a dainty setting without sacrificing a jot of their strength. After reading such a book a judicious bit of Miss Conway’s prose comes to my mind. “And as that Catholic light, the only true vision, brightens about us, we realize more and more that literary genius, take it all and all, has done more to attract men to good than to seduce men to evil; that the best literature is also the most fascinating, and even by its very abundance is more than a match for the bad; that time is its best ally; that it is hard, if not impossible, to corrupt the once formed pure literary taste; and, finally, that as makers of literature or critics or disseminators of it, it is our duty to believe in the best, hope in the best, and steadfastly appeal to the best in human nature; for we needs must love the highest when we see it.”

Katherine Eleanor Conway was born of Irish parents, in Rochester, on the 6th of Sept., 1853. Her early studies were made in the convent schools of her native city. From an early age she had whisperings of the muse. These whisperings at the age of fifteen convinced her that her true sphere of action was literature. In 1875 she commenced the publication of a modest little Catholic monthly, contributing poems and moral tales, under the _nom-de-plume_ of “Mercedes,” to other Catholic journals, in the spare hours left from editing her little venture and teaching in the convent. In 1878 she became attached to the Buffalo _Union and Times_. To this journal she contributed the most of the poems to be found in her maiden volume,—“On the Sunrise Slope,”—a volume whose rich promise has been amply fulfilled in the “Dream of Lilies.” Her health failing, she sought a needful rest in Boston. Her fame had preceded her, and the gifted editor of the _Pilot_, ever on the lookout for a hopeful literary aspirant of his race, held out a willing hand to the shy stranger. “Come to us,” he said, in a voice that knew no guile, “and help us in the good fight.” That fight—the crowning glory of O’Reilly’s noble life—was to gain an adequate position for his race and religion from the puritanism of New England. How that race and religion were held before his coming, may be best told in the language of Miss Conway, taken from a heart-sketch of her dead master and minstrel:—

“Notwithstanding Matignon and Cheverus, and the Protestant Governor Sullivan, Catholic and Irish were, from the outset, simply interchangeable terms—and terms of odium both—in the popular New England mind; in vain the bond of a common language, in vain the Irishman’s prompt and affectionate acceptance of the duties of American citizenship. To but slight softening of prejudice even his sacrifice of blood and life on every battle-field in the Civil War, in proof of the sincerity of his political profession of faith. He and his were still hounded as a class inferior and apart. They were almost unknown in the social and literary life of New England. Their pathetic sacrifices for their kin beyond the sea, their interest in the political fortunes of the old land, were jests and by-words. Their religion was the superstition of the ignorant, vulgar and pusillanimous; or, at best, motive for jealous suspicion of divided political allegiance and threatened “foreign” domination. Their children suffered petty persecutions in the public schools. The stage and the press faithfully reflected the ruling popular sentiment in their caricatures of the Catholic Irishman.”

She accepted O’Reilly’s call and stood by his side with Roche, Guiney, Blake, until the hard fought battle against the prejudice to Irishism and Catholicism, planted in New England by the bigoted literature of Old England, was abated, if not destroyed; until its shadows, if cast now, are cast by the lower rather than the higher orders in the world of intellect and refinement. “And the shortening of the shadow is proof that the sun is rising,” proof that her work has been far from vain. And when from the grey dawn of prejudice will come forth the white morrow of charity and truth, the singer and her songs will not be forgotten.

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.

In speaking with the author of a “Dream of Lilies,” I casually mentioned the name of another Boston poetess, “one of the _Pilot_ poets,” as the gifted Carpenter was wont to speak of those whose genius was nursed by Boyle O’Reilly. For a few years previous to my coming, little waif poems, suggestive of talent and refinement, had seen light in the columns of that brilliant journal. They had about them that something which makes the reader hazard a bet that the youngster when fully fledged would some day leave the lowlands of minor minstrelsy for a height on Parnassus. From this singer Miss Conway had that morning received a notelet. It was none of the ordinary kind, a little anarchistic, if one might judge from the awkward pen-sketch of a hideous grinning skeleton-skull held by cross-bones which served as an illustration to the bantering text that followed, in a rather cramped girlish hand. The notelet was signed Louise Imogen Guiney.

“Are you not afraid, Miss Conway,” said I, “to receive such warning notes?” “It is from the best girl in America,” was the frank reply; “read it.” A perusal of the few dashing lines was enough, and my generous host, reading my eyes, gave me the coveted notelet. That notelet begot an interest in the writer; an interest fully repaid by the strong, careful work put forth under her name. Louise Imogen Guiney, poet, essayist, dramatist, was born in Boston, that city of “sweetness and light,” in January, 1862. Her parents were Irish. Her father, Patrick Guiney, came from the hamlet of Parkstown, County Tipperary, at an early age. He was a man of the most blameless and noble character. During the civil war, as Col. Guiney of the Irish Ninth Massachusetts Volunteers, his heroism on behalf of his adopted country won him the grateful admiration of all lovers of freedom. This admiration at the close of the war was substantially shown by his election as Judge of Probate. Constant suffering from an old wound, received at the battle of the Wilderness, gave the old soldier but few years to enjoy honors from his fellow-citizens. His death was mourned by all who loved virtue and honor. Of him a Boston poet sang:

“Large heart and brave! Tried soul and true!
How thickly in thy life’s short span,
All strong sweet virtues throve and grew,
As friend, as hero, and as man.
Unmoved by thought of blame or praise,
Unbought by gifts of power and pride,
Thy feet still trod Time’s devious ways
With Duty as thy law and guide.”

Good blood, you will say, from whence our poet came, and blood counts even in poetry. I have no anecdotes to relate of Miss Guiney’s early years. I am not sure that there were any. Anecdotes are usually manufactured in later life, if the subject happens to become famous. Her education was carefully planned, and intelligently carried out. She was not held in the dull routine of the school-room, but was allowed to emancipate herself in the works of the poets. What joy must have been her’s, scampering home after the study of _de omni scibili_, the ordinary curriculum of any American school, to a quiet nook and the dream of her poets. Amid these dreams came the siren whisperings of the muse, telling her of the poet within struggling for life and expression. These struggles begot a tiny little volume happily named “Songs at the Start.” The great American reviewer, who, ordinarily,

“Bolts every book that comes out of the press,
Without the least question of larger or less,”

on this occasion, by some untoward event, stumbled on a truth when he informed us, with the air of one who rarely touches earth, that the book bore signs of promise. The people, by all means a better critic, were more apt in their judgment of the young singer. A few years later they asked her to write the memorial poem for the services in commemoration of General Grant. Thus honored by her native city, in an easy way she was led to climb the ladder of fame. In 1885 appeared her first volume of essays, “Goose Quill Papers;” in 1887 a volume of poems bearing the fanciful name of “White-Sail;” in 1888 a pretty book for children; in 1892 “Monsieur Henri, a Foot-note to French History.” It us something to be noted in regard to a “Foot-note to French history,” that the novelist Stevenson, in his far-off home in Samoa, was publishing at the same time a work which bore a decided likeness to her title. Stevenson’s book was published as “A Foot-Note to History.” In 1893 appeared her latest volume of verse, being a selection of poems previously published in American magazines. This selection (the poet has a genuine knack for tacking taking names to her volumes) is quaintly named “A Wayside Harp,” and dedicated to a brace of Irish poets, the Sigerson sisters. The graceful dedication as well as many of its strongest and most artistic poems, were the outcome of a trip to Great Britain and Ireland. The author travelled with open eyes, and brought back many a dainty picture of the scenes she had so lovingly witnessed. This volume fulfils the early promise, and what is more, gives indubitable signs that the poet possesses a reserve force. Not a few women poets write themselves out in their first volume. Not so with Miss Guiney, every additional volume shows greater strength and more complete mastery of technique. After the surfeit of twaddle passing current as poetry, such a book as “A Wayside Harp” should find a waiting audience, Miss Guiney has the essentials of a poet, which I take to be color, music, perfume and passion. In their use she is an artist. In her first book an excess of these everywhere prevailed; it was from this excess, however, that the prudent critic would have hazarded a doubt as to her fitness to join the company of the bards. Since then she has been an ardent student. This study has not only taught her limitations, a thing that saves so much after pruning, but that other lesson, forgotten by so many bardlets, that the greatest poetic effects are the result of the masterful mixing of a few simple colors. It is well that she has learned these lessons at the outset of her career. Let not the fads and fancies of this _fin de siècle_ and the senseless worship of those poetasters who scorn sense while they hug sound lead her from the true road of song. No amount of meaningless words airily strung together, no amount of gymnastic rhyming feats can produce a poet. They are the badges of those wondrous little dunces that pass nature with a frown, alleging in the language of the witty Bangs that “Nature is not art.” Guiney’s friend and faithful mentor, O’Reilly, had taught her to abhor all those who spent their waking hours chiselling cherry stones. To him it was a poet’s duty to aim high, attune his lyre, not to the petty, but the manly and hopeful; never to debase the lyre by an utterance of selfishness, but to consecrate it with the strains of liberty and humanity. If Guiney follows the teachings of her early friend—teachings which are substantially sound, she will yet produce poems that the world will not willingly let die. That Rosetti fad of hiding a mystic meaning in a poem, now occupying the brains of our teeming songsters, is now and then to be met with in our poet. It is a trade-trick. Poetry is sense—common-sense at that, and you cannot rim common-sense things with mystical hues. Abjuring these trade-tricks, and shaking off the trammels of her curious and extensive reading and evolving from herself solely, she has, says Douglas Sladen, a great promise before her. As an instance of this promise let us quote that fine poem, “The Wild Ride,” which is full of genuine inspiration, and which may be the means of introducing to some the most thoroughly gifted Catholic woman writer of our country.

THE WILD RIDE.

I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,
All day, the commotion of sinewy mane-tossing horses;
All night from their cells the importunate tramping and neighing,
Cowards and laggards fall back but alert to the saddle,
Straight, grim, and abreast, vault our weather-worn galloping legion,
With a stirrup cup each to the one gracious woman that loves him.
The road is thro’ dolour and dread, over crags and morasses!
There are shapes by the way, there are things that appall or entice us!
What odds! We are knights, and our souls are but bent on the riding!
I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,
All day, the commotion of sinewy, mane-tossing horses;
All night from their cells the importunate tramping and neighing,
We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm wind;
We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil,
Thou leadest! O God! All’s well with thy troopers that follow.

It was only natural that the daughter of an Irish patriot should sing of her father’s land, and that in a style racy of that land. It was a hazardous experiment, as many an Irish American singer has learned in sorrow. That Miss Guiney has come out of the trying ordeal successfully, may be seen in the following little snatch, full of the aroma of green Erin:

AN IRISH PEASANT SONG.

I try to knead and spin, but my life is low the while;
Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile;
Yet when I walk alone, and think of naught at all,
Why from me that’s young should the wild tears fall?

The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams,
They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams;
And yonder ivy fondling the broken castle wall,
It pulls my heart, till the wild tears fall.

The cabin-door looks down a furze-lighted hill,
And far as Leighlin cross the fields are green and still;
But once I hear a blackbird in Leighlin hedges call,
The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!

Miss Guiney possesses a charming personality. Her manner is “unaffected, girlish and modest.” There is about her none of the curtness and prudishness of the blue-stocking. Success has not turned her head, literary homage has not made her forget that they who will build for time must need work long and patiently, using only the best material. By so doing may it be written of her work, as she has written of Brother Bartholomew’s:

“Wonderful verses! fair and fine,
Rich in the old Greek loveliness;
The seer-like vision, half divine;
Pathos and merriment in excess,
And every perfect stanza told,
Of love and of labor manifold.”

MRS. BLAKE.

Boston is a charming city. It is the whim of the passing hour to sneer at the modest dame. Henry James has done so. Is not the author of “Daisy Miller” and other interminable novels a correct person to follow? The disciples of the Mutual Admiration Society in American Letters will vociferously answer “yes.” Old-fashioned people may have another way. Scattered here and there possibly a few there are who hold that Hawthorne was a better novelist than Howells is, that Holmes’ poetry is as good as Boyesen’s, and that Emerson’s criticisms are more illuminative than James’. Be this as it may, Boston is a charming place to all those who had the good fortune to have been welcomed by its warm-hearted citizen, Boyle O’Reilly. To those who knew his struggles, and the earnest striving, until his weary spirit sought its final home, for Catholic literature in its true sense, the charm but increases.

It was owing to his kindness that I found myself one blustery, raw day, ringing the door-bell of an ordinary well to-do brick house. Houses now and then carry on their fronts an inkling of their occupants. A door was opened, my card handed to a feminine hand; the aperture was not as yet wide enough to catch a glimpse of the face. The card was a power. “Come in,” said a woman’s voice, and the door was wide open. I followed the guide, and was soon in a plain, well furnished room, in presence of a motherly-looking woman. She was knitting; at least that is part of my memory’s picture. Near her hung a mocking-bird, whose notes now and then were peculiarly sad. Despite the graceful lines of the Cavalier Lovelace, iron bars do a prison make for bird and man. And the songs sung behind these bars are but bits of the crushed-out life. I was welcomed, and during busy years have held the remembrance of that visit with its hour of desultory chat and a mocking-bird’s broken song. The motherly-looking woman, with her strong Celtic face freshly furrowed by sorrow in the loss of beloved children, was a charming talker and a good listener, things rarely found in your gentle or fiery poetess. She had just published, under the initials M. A. B., a volume of children’s verse, and, as is natural with an author who had finished a piece of work, was full of it. The pretense of some authors that they are bored to speak of their own books is a sly suggestion to praise them for their humility. Mrs. Blake—for that is the motherly-looking woman’s name—spoke of her work without any hiccoughing gush or false modesty. Her eyes lit up, and the observer read in them honesty. She was deeply interested, as all thinking women must be, in the solution of the social problems that have arisen in our times, and will not be downed at the biddance of capitalist or demagogue. With her clear-cut intellect she was able to grasp a salient point, purposely hidden by the swarm of curists with their panacea remedies, that these problems must be solved in the light of religion. Man must return to Christ, not the “cautious, statistical Christ” paraded in the social show, not

“The meteor blaze
That soon must fail, and leave the wanderer blind,
More dark and helpless far, than if it ne’er had shined,”

but the Christ of the Gospels, the Bringer of peace and good-will—the Bearer of burdens, the soul-guider—Christ, loving and acting, as found in the Catholic Church. Hecker had begun the preface of his wonderful book with a truth, “The age is out of joint.” Problems to be solved, and lying around them millions of broken hearts. “The age is out of joint.” Who will bring the light and rightify the age? Mrs. Blake has but one answer. Bring the employers and the employed nearer the Christ of the Catholic Church. This was O’Reilly’s often expressed and worked-for idea. It is the key-note of much of his poetry. It is the germ of his “Bohemia.” It was impossible to live, as Mrs. Blake did, on the most friendly terms with such a man and not be smitten with his life-thought. In not a few published social papers Mrs. Blake has thrown out valuable and suggestive hints as to the best means of bringing the weary world under the sweet sway of religion. Her voice, it is true, is but one voice in the social wilderness, but individual efforts must not be thwarted, for is not a fresh period opening in which the individuality, the personality, of souls acting under the direct guidance of the Holy Ghost, will take up all that is good in modern ideas, and the cords of our tent be strengthened and its stakes enlarged? “What we have to dread is neither ‘historical rancor’ nor ‘philosophical atheism,’” “nor the instinct of personal freedom.” It is, in the words of Dr. Barry, that we should set little store by that “freedom wherewith Christ has made us free,” and that being born into a church where we may have the grandest spiritual ideas for the asking, we should fold our hands in slumber and be found, at length, “disobedient to the heavenly vision.” Against such perils Hecker, the noblest life as yet in our American church, made a life-fight. On his side was Boyle O’Reilly, Roche, Mrs. Blake, Katherine Conway and Louise Guiney. Nor pass such lives in vain.

Mrs. Blake was born in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, Ireland. In childhood she was brought to Massachusetts. In 1865 she was married to Dr. J. G. Blake, a leading physician of Boston. She has made that city her home, and is highly esteemed in its literary and social circles. Among her published books may be mentioned “Poems,” Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1882, dedicated to her husband; “On The Wing,” a pretty volume of Californian sketches; “Rambling Talk,” a series of papers contributed to the Boston journals.

Her sketches are the agreeable jottings of a highly cultivated woman; seeing nature in the light of poetry rather than science, she has made a series of charming pictures out of her wanderings. They are not free from sentiment,—illusions if you will, but that is their greatest charm. “The world of reality is a poor affair.” So many books of travel are annually appearing,—books that have no excuse for being other than to prove how widespread dulness and incapacity is, that a trip with a guide like Mrs. Blake has but one failing,—its shortness. Neither in her travels nor in her literary articles does Mrs. Blake body forth her best prose utterance. These must be found in her earnest social papers, where her woman’s heart, saddened by the miseries of its fellows, pours out its streams of consolation and preaches (all earnest souls must be preachers now-a-days) the only and all sufficient cure—the Church.

An extract from one of these papers will best show her power. She is portraying the Church manifesting itself in the individual as well as the family life, pleading for the central idea of her system. “Jesus Christ is the complement of man,”—the restorer of the race. The Catholic Church is the manifestation of Jesus Christ.

“There are, alas! too many weaknesses into which thoughtlessness and opportunity lead one class as well as the other. But still there is to be seen almost without exception, among practical Catholics, young wives, content and happy, welcoming from the very outset of married life the blessed company of the little ones who are to guard them as do their angels in heaven; proud like Cornelia of their jewels; gladly accepting comparative poverty and endless care; while their sisters outside the Church buy the right to idleness and personal adorning at the expense of the childless homes which are a disgrace and menace to the nation. There is the honor and purity of the fireside respected; the overpowering sweetness and strength of family ties acknowledged; the reverential love that awaits upon the father and mother shown. There are sensitive and refined women bearing sorrow with resignation and hardship without rebellion; combating pain with patience and fulfilling harsh duty without complaint. In a tremendous over-proportion to those who attempt to live outside its helpfulness, and in exact ratio to their practical devotion to the observances of the Church, they find power of resisting temptation in spite of poverty, and overcoming impulse by principle. Can the world afford to ignore an agency by which so much is accomplished?

“So much for the practical side, which is the moral that particularly needs pointing at this moment. Of the spiritual amplitude and sustaining which the Church gives there is little need to speak. Only a woman can know what Faith means in the existence of women. The uplift which she needs in moments of great trial; the sustaining power to bear the constant harassment of petty worries; the outlet for emotions which otherwise choke the springs, the tonic of prayer and belief; the assurance of a force sufficiently divine and eternal to satisfy the cravings of human longing—what but this is to make life worth living for her? And where else, in these days of scepticism, is she to find such immortal dower? It is a commentary upon worldly wisdom, that it has attempted to ignore this necessity, and left woman under the increased pressure of her new obligations, to rely solely upon such frail reeds as human respect and conventional morality. She needs the inspiration of profound conviction and practical piety a hundredfold more than ever before. The woman of the old time, secluded within the limits of the household, surrounded by the material safeguard of custom, might lead an untroubled existence even if devotion and faith were not vital principles with her. The woman of to-day, harassed, beset, tempted, driven by necessity, drawn this way and that by bad advice and worse example, is attempting a hopeless task when she tries the same experiment.”

The poetry of Mrs. Blake is rational and wholesome. She knows her gifts and is content to use them at their best, giving us songs in a minor key, that if they add little to human thought, yet make the world better from their coming. In the poems of childhood she is particularly happy. She knows children, their joys and sorrows, has caught their ways. Her’s is a heart that has danced in the joy of motherhood and been stricken when the “dead do not waken.” She is our only intelligent writer of children’s poems. The assertion may be controverted. A hundred Catholic poets for children may be cited writers “of genius profound,” of “exquisite fancy,” “whose works should grace every parish library.” I quote a stereotyped criticism, a constant expression with Catholic reviewers. I laugh, in my hermitage, and blandly suggest, to all whom it may concern, that insanity in jingles is not relished by sane children. I speak from experience, having perpetrated a selection from the one hundred on a class of bright boys and girls. Peaceful sleep, and, let us hope, pleasant dreams, came to their aid. Shall I ever, Comus, forget their faces in the transition moment from dulness to delight? Let us cease cant and rapturous criticism. Catholic literature, to survive the time that gave it birth, must be built on other foundations. Hasty and unconscious productions must be branded as such. We must have, as the French so well put it, a horror of “pacotille” and “camelotte.” “If my works are good,” said the sculptor Rude, “they will endure; if not, all the laudation in the world would not save them from oblivion.” The same may well be written of Catholic literature. Whether for children or grown-up men or women, as a Catholic critic, whose only aim has been to gain an audience for my fellow Catholic writers whose works can bear a favorable comparison with the best contemporary thought, I ask that the best shall be given, and that given, it shall be joyfully received; that trash shall not fill the book-cases, lie on the parlor-tables, be puffed in our weeklies, and genius and sacrifice be forgotten. I ask that the works of Stoddard, Johnston, Egan, Roche, Azarias, Lathrop, Tabb, Miss Repplier, Guiney, Katherine Conway, Mrs. Blake, find a welcome in each Catholic household, and that the Catholic press make their delightful personalities known to our rising generation. Of their best they have given. Shall they die before we acknowledge it?

AGNES REPPLIER.

A friend of mine, a dweller in the city, a lover of red bricks, one to whom the sound of the dray-cart merrily grinding on the pavement is sweeter music than a burst of woodland song, has tardily conceded that the Adirondacks, on a summer day, is pleasant. I value his testimony and record it with pleasure. Let us be thankful for small favors when cynics are the donors. For me these woods, lakes and crystal streams hold an indescribable charm. They are the true abode of man. Here is liberty, while the city is but a cage, with its thousands uttering the plaintive cry of Sterne’s prisoned starling, “I cannot get out.” For the hum of wheels we have the songs of birds, the music of waterfalls, the purr of mountain brooks and the harmonies of the winds playing through the thousand different species of trees, each one differing in melody, but combining in one grand symphony. Orchestras are muffled music when compared to nature’s lute. The pipes of Pan is but a poet’s struggle to embody in speech such a symphony. For the city’s smells, that not even a Ruskin could paint, albeit they are far from elusive, we have the mountain air that has dallied with the streams and stolen the fragrance of a thousand clover fields. Every man to his taste. There is no disputing of this. Lamb loved bricks and Wordsworth such scenes as ours; yet, Lamb would be as sadly missed from our libraries as Wordsworth. Swing my hammock in the shade of yonder pines, good Patsy. A robin is piping his sweetest notes to his brooding spouse, the Salmon river runs at my feet, biting the sandy shore, laughing loud when a saucy stone falls in its current. From over the hills comes the scent of new-mown hay; bless me! this is pleasant. To add to this enjoyment you have brought a book—something bright, you tell me. I’ll soon see. And gliding into my hammock, I said my first good morning to Agnes Repplier. It was a breezy good morning, one of those where the hand unconsciously goes out as much as to say: Old fellow, you don’t know how glad I am to see you. There was no friend with a white cravat standing on the first page to introduce us, and tell us that the authoress bore in her book a fecund message to struggling humanity, and that the major part of that same humanity could not see it; hence it was his duty to stand at the portal and solve the riddle. There was no begging for recognition on the score of ancestors, fads or isms. I am Agnes Repplier, said the book; how do you like me? A few pages perused, and my own voice amusingly fell on my ears, saying first class. Here was a woman who thought—not the trivial thought that nauseates in the books of so many literary women—but virile aggressive thought, that provokes, contradicts, and, like Hamlet’s ghost, will not be downed. This thought is folded in a garment, whose many hues quicken the curiosity and make her pages a continual feast of wit, droll irony, and illuminative criticism all curiously and harmoniously blended. Her pages are rich in suggestion, apt in quotation. You are constantly aroused, put on your guard, laughingly disarmed, and that in a way that Lamb would have loved. She has no awe in the presence of literary gods. Lightly she trips up to them with her poniard, shows by a pass that they are made of mud, and that the aureole that encircles them is but the work of your crude imagination. Clearing away your shreds and patches she puts the author in a plain suit before you, and, how you wonder, that with all your boasted knowledge you have called for years a jackdaw a peacock!

How delightful to watch this critic armed _cap-a-pie_, demolishing some fad, that has masqueraded for years as genuine literature. Is it little Lord Fauntleroy, a character sloppy, inane, impossible to real life, yet hugged to the heart by the commonplace. Miss Repplier keenly surveys her ground, as an artist would the statue of his rival, notes the foibles, cant, false poses, and crazy-quilt jargon used to deck pet characters. Experience has taught her that you cannot combat seriously the commonplace. “The statesman or the poet,” says Dudley Warner, “who launches out unmindful of this, will be likely to come to grief in his generation.” Sly humor, pungent sarcasm, are the weapons effectively used. The little Lord is unrobed, and the life that seemed so full of charity and virtue, becomes but a mixture of hypocrisy and snobbery. Yet, if some of our critics could, “all the dear old nursery favorites must be banished from our midst, and the rising generation of prigs must be nourished exclusively on Little Lord Fauntleroy, and other carefully selected specimens of milk and water diet.” The dear land of romance, in its most charming phase, that phase represented by Red Riding Hood, Ali Baba, Blue Beard, and the other heroes of our nurseryhood must be eliminated, for children are no longer children, in the old sense of believing “in such stuff” without questioning. American children, at any rate, are too sensitively organized to endure the unredeemed ferocity of the old fairy stories, we are told, and it is added, “no mother nowadays tells them in their unmitigated brutality.” These are the empty sayings of the realists, who would have every child break its dolls to analyze the sawdust. The most casual observer of American homes knows that our children will not be fed on such stuff as realists are able to give, but will turn wistfully back to those brave old tales which are their inheritance from a splendid past, and of which no hand shall rob them. As Miss Repplier so well puts it, “we could not banish Blue Beard if we would. He is as immortal as Hamlet, and when hundreds of years shall have passed over this uncomfortably enlightened world, the children of the future—who, thank Heaven, can never, with all our efforts, be born grown-up—will still tremble at the blood-stained key, and rejoice when the big brave brothers come galloping up the road.” Ferocity, brutality, if you will, may couch on every page, but this is much better than the sugared nothingness of Sunday school tales, and beats all hollow, as the expression goes, the many tricks perpetrated on children by the school of analytical fiction. Children will read Blue Beard, and thank Heaven, as grown-up men, for such a childish pleasure, adding a prayer for her who wrote the “Battle of the Babies.” Bunner and others have accused Miss Repplier of ignoring contemporary works, of rudely closing in their face her library door and saying he who enters here must have outgrown his swaddling clothes, must have rounded out his good half-century. This may be one of Bunner’s skits. Even if it were not, there is more than one precedent to follow. Hazlitt, in his delightful chat on the “Reading of Old Books,” begins his essay, “I hate to read new books.” This author has the courage of his convictions; you do not grope in the dark to know why. Here is the reason, and it is easier to assent to it than to deny it. “Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes—one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merits of either. One candidate for literary fame, who happens to be of our acquaintance writes finely, and like a man of genius; but unfortunately has a foolish fad, which spoils a delicate passage;—another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not come quite up to our expectation in print.” All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections. These are sound reasons; as if to clinch them he adds, “but the dust, smoke, and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.”

Miss Repplier, an admirer of Hazlitt, and if one may hazard a guess, her master in style, would not go so far. She believes in keeping up with a decent portion of current literature, and “this means perpetual labor and speed,” whereas idleness and leisure are requisite for the true enjoyment of books. To read all the frothings of the press for the sake of being called a contemporary critic were madness. She concurs with another critic that reading is not a duty, and that no man is under any obligation to read what another man wrote. When Miss Repplier stumbles across an unknown volume, picking it up dubiously, and finds in it an hour of placid but genuine enjoyment, although it is a modern book, wanting in sanctifying dust, she will use all her art to make in other hearts a loving welcome for the little stranger. “A By-Way in Fiction” tells in her own way, of a recent book born of Italian soil and sunshine, “The Chevalier of Pensieri Vani.” It is the essayist’s right to read those books, ancient or modern, that are to her taste, and it is a bit of impertinence in any writer to particularly recommend to Miss Repplier a list of books, which she is naturally indisposed to consider with much kindness, thrust upon her as they are, like paregoric or porous plaster. “If there be people who can take their pleasures medicinally, let them read by prescription and grow fat.” Our authoress can do her own quarrying. One of the darts thrown at this charming writer is, that she would have children pore through books at their own sweet, wild will, unoppressed by that modern infliction—foot-notes. That, when a child would meet the word dog, an asterisk would not hold him to a foot-note occupying a page and giving all that science knows about that interesting animal. This is precisely the privilege that your modern critic will not allow. He will have his explanations, his margins, “build you a bridge over a rain-drop, put ladders up a pebble, and encompass you on every side with ingenious alpen-stocks and climbing irons, yet when perchance you stumble and hold out a hand for help, behold! he is never there to grasp it.” What does a boy, plunging into Scott or Byron, want with these atrocities? The imagery that peoples his mind, the music that sweeps through his soul, these, and not your stilted erudition, are the milk and honey of boyhood. “I once knew a boy,” says Miss Repplier, in that sparkling defense, ‘Oppression of Notes,’ “who so delighted in Byron’s description of the dying gladiator that he made me read it to him over and over again. He did not know—and I never told him—what a gladiator was. He did not know that it was a statue, and not a real man described. He had not the faintest notion of what was meant by the Danube, or the Dacian mother or a Roman holiday; historically and geographically, the boy’s mind was a happy blank. There was nothing intelligent, only a blissful stirring of the heartstrings by reason of strong words and swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping thoughts.” Had the reader stopped the course of the swinging verse to explain these unknown words, boyish happiness would have flown, oppression become complete, and let us hope sleep would have rescued the bored boy from such an ordeal.

Cowley, full of good sense, is on the side of our essayist. In his essay “On Myself” he relates the charm of verse, falling on his boyish ear, without comprehending fully its purport. “I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there. For I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother’s parlor (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser’s works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, giants, and monsters, and brave houses, which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this), and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all over, before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as immediately as a child is made an eunuch.” The charm of Miss Repplier’s pages lies in their good sense. She is a lover of the good and beautiful, a hater of shams and shoddies. Everything she touches becomes more interesting, whether it be Gastronomy, Old Maids, Cats, Babies, or the New York Custom House. Like Lamb and Hazlitt, a lover of old books, finding in them the pure silent air of immortality, she will welcome graciously any new book whose worth is its passport.

Agnes Repplier was born in the city of brotherly love more than thirty years ago. Her father was John Repplier, a well-known coal merchant. Her earliest playmates were books. Her mother a brilliant and lovable woman, fond of books, and, as a friend of her’s informed me, a writer of ability, watched over and directed the education of her more brilliant daughter. Under such a mother, amid scenes of culture, Agnes grew up, finding in books a solace for ill-health that still continues to harry her. When she entered the arena of authorship, by training and study she was well equipped. At once she was reckoned as a sovereign princess of “That proud and humble ... Gipsey Land,” one of the very elect of Bohemia. She came, as Stedman says, “with gentle satire or sparkling epigram to brush aside the fads and fallacies of this literary _fin de siècle_, calling upon us to return to the simple ways of the masters.” Her charming volumes should be in the hands of every student of literature as a corrective against the debasing theories and tendencies of modern book-making. The student will find that if she does not know all things in heaven and on earth, she may plead in the language of Little Breeches:

“I never ain’t had no show;
But I’ve got a middlin’ tight grip, sir
On the handful o’ things I know.”

A WORD.

LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR.

We are told, with some show of truth, that this age shall be noted in history as one given to the study of social problems. The contemporary literature of a country is a good index to what people are thinking about. Magazines are, as a rule, for their time, and deal with the forces upward in men’s minds. The most cursory glance at their contents will show the predominance of the Social Problem treated from some phase or other. The best minds are engaged as partisans. Social science may be said to be the order of the day. It has crushed poetry to the skirts of advertising, romance is its happy basking ground. The drama has made it its own. There are some, fogies of course, so says your sapient scientist, who believe that the social science so spasmodically treated in current literature is but a passing fad, and that poetry shall be restored to her old quarters, romance amuse as of old, and the drama be winnowed of rant, scenic sensation, and bestial morality. These dreams may be vain, but then even fogies have their hopes. A branch of this science—the tree is overshadowing—treats of the literature and the masses. Anything about the masses interests me.